Wondering if anyone out there went through periodic addiction to a wickedly absorbing game called "Civilization II." Another one of those is "Sim City."

After playing those games I am struck by how--at one moment--I can be gloating at how successful and productive and ingenius my civilization is. Then, almost in a blink of an eye, little failures in my planning begin to cascade throughout the whole dominion. I.e., I may have a booming, kick-ass economy with lots of universities and rapid technological advancement--but a fairly weak defence. The next second I am faced with three jelous, allied civilizations at war with me, two of them hurling nuclear weapons at my cities. This puts a bit of a damper on my booming economy and tecnological advancement.

My point: these sorts of games have a way of telling me how forgetful and unaware I can be at times. I therefore appreciate not necessarily WHERE or WHEN failure occurs but I sure as heck know HOW it occurs, and in hindsight, WHY it occurs. Sometimes I think we as a society are a bit too much like I get when I marvel at my cool little Empire on the computer screen, just before it all starts to unravel and I walk away cursing at having wasted five hours.

Does anybody else out there mess around with this kind of "video crack" from time to time, and can glean insight on how it could relate to y2k?

-- coprolith (notmyaddress@fake.com), October 06, 1999

Answers

Yes, I've played it, and it's a good example of "interconectedness". All of you pollys should give it a try. You'll understand what we're worried about then... I like to see a y2k game... Hmmmmmm... If it's no worse that a depression they maybe... I figure that in a depression senerieo, video-games, tv ect, will be popular as ways to escape presant troubles. Price may go down, but entertainment will stilll be popular, don't you think? However, if it's TEOTWAWKI, than forget about recreation...

-- Crono (Crono@timesedn.com), October 06, 1999.

Coprolith,

I played Civ II some years ago; one of my better scores was a 400% rating in Diety mode by the 1930s. You can call me Stan Sama the Magnificent [laughing]. I rememeber that one game could go for 12 hours or more. Back in college, I used to play a less graphically intense game called strategic conquest. It had a great ending if you won: "General, the world is yours." However, I'm not convinced that the strategies I used to win those games are useful in the real world. Still, you make a good point.

Sincerely, Stan Faryna

-- Stan Faryna (faryna@groupmail.com), October 06, 1999.

One night years ago, during a trip across Florida, I woke up with a bad head cold in the dark middle of the night, in a strange hotel room, totally disoriented to hear the most ungodly moaning. Scared me to death.

Turned out to be my son's computer... he had hooked up Sim City and what had started out as a glorious experiment had turned into deadly world plague. The moans coming from the computer were freaky.

Maybe just like the moans that will be coming from the computers ... and us... next year.

-- (Oxsys@aol.com), October 06, 1999.

A company called HPS puts out a systems-modelling software called "Stella II," the tutorials for which can give you a solid grounding in systems theory and design. It's more abstract than Simcity, but you can feed real data into it: population studies, chemical reactions, etc.. It's used in biosciences, chemistry, social sciences, etc..

-- Dr. Polymorph (Iknowmore@thanyoudo.com), October 06, 1999.